A Short History Of Need For Speed: Most Wanted

Need for Speed games used to be developed like clockwork. From 2002 to 2013, there was at least one Need for Speed game a year, sometimes more. So there wasn't a great deal of time for alternative visions.

But around 2003 and 2004, there was two different views on where the franchise could go: Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and Need for Speed: Repo Man.

A history of the game's pre-production phase is outlined in the first several minutes of the latest Raycevick video, which you can view below. It touches on the game's pre-production phase, and some of the clues left behind in the NFS games.

While Underground 2 was being developed in early 2004, a team at Black Box started working on what Most Wanted would look like. It's not sure when Mia Townsend's role shifted — she was originally shown as an underground racer, third on the Black List — or whether Black Box originally intended for the player to be the underground cop all along.

Most Wanted would eventually adopt a grungier tone, rather than the over-the-top styling seen in some of the pre-production art. Raycevick's video is also a good reminder of how much tuning difficulty settings needed in oldschool arcade games: the grind of working through events until you could get a modified, or better car, could be brutal.

I'd still like an Underground 3, that said. Surely someone at EA could make this happen - hell, I'd even take it as a mobile game.

Comments

The 2012 'Most Wanted' reboot was an absolute travesty, akin to pissing on the original's name. No story, no sense of progression, no real customisation, no ownership, no character, no reason to play.

I'm sure it's said all the damn time. Give us an Underground 3 which is essentially a modern Underground 2, and give us a true to the original Most Wanted, you will be rolling in money. But no, apparently that isn't what they want, given the many numerous miss-steps they've made with the games over the past decade.